Automatically click a link and navigate to another page

Question

I need to test a page tracker behavior. The tracker's reporting triggers when links are clicked, however generating a click event on anchor elements doesn't instruct the browser to navigate to the page in the link. I tried Selenium IDE - to no effect.

Is there any way to accomplish this? Perhaps some browser setting? If it is specific to Firefox or Google Chrome or Opera - it doesn't matter, I could use any of those for testing.

Here's a similar question How do I programmatically click a link with javascript? but it doesn't help in my case, as as I just described, no navigation happens in this case.

So you simple need to programmaticaly in JavaScript click an link? — Yuriy Galanter, Jun 19 '13 at 14:05

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 19 '13 at 14:08

1

 <a id="gLink" href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>

<script>
    document.getElementById("gLink").click()
</script>

Does the trick.

answered Jun 19 '13 at 14:08

Yuriy Galanter

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score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:08

Normally, clicking on an anchor link takes you somewhere else inside the page and changes the anchor link to foo.php#bar (where bar is the name of the anchor), so this behavior is by design.

Here are all the different methods I can think of

Method 1: adapt your tracker

Perhaps you can configure your tracker to track these changes? Clicking on an anchor fires up the hashchange event. Check this SO question

Check these links for ways to utilize the hashchange event:

Method 2: use the HTML5 history API

You can change your browser's URLs programmatically via the HTML5 pushState() method, i.e. the history API.

Here are some examples of utilizing the HTML history API:

Automatically click a link and navigate to another page

2 Answers2

Method 1: adapt your tracker

Method 2: use the HTML5 history API